Mark Souder: “I wanted to raise a couple of things that were in yesterday's newspaper that illustrate that as much as we would like…”

“I wanted to raise a couple of things that were in yesterday's newspaper that illustrate that as much as we would like the drug problem in America to go away, it has not gone away. The front page of The New York Times says, ``Violence Rises as Club Drug Spreads Out Into the Streets.'' And it is yet another story about Ecstasy. On the front page of USA Today just a month ago, ``Ecstasy Drug Trade Turns Violent.'' What we see from the charts is that it is exploding on the West Coast, it is stabilized on the East Coast, in the Midwest it is soaring; and in the south it is roughly stabilized. We are seeing more and more kids realize the extreme dangers as more and more overdose, as more and more lose ground in their schooling as they see side effects like depression, particularly at the so-called rave parties which have been featured a lot in New Orleans and other places on some national TV shows. Just as crack cocaine became an epidemic in America, we are seeing the start of the Ecstasy movement. This is partly because of the drug legalization movement in the Netherlands and in Europe. We are seeing Ecstasy exported from Belgium and the Netherlands into the U.S. It is increasingly becoming the drug of choice. We need to be aggressive in our law enforcement, we need to be aggressive in our prevention and treatment programs, in our outreach programs, as well as our interdiction programs.”